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beer styles ' ...

I want to start by making a note on my use of the BJCP guidelines for this exercise. The purpose is not to necessarily categorize the BJCP guidelines themselves, so much as use the existing guidelines as a list of statistics for “typical beers” to represent what should be pretty much every beer in existence. Basically, I’d like to create a final formula/set of statistical guidelines that can describe any beer. In the absence of an enormous amount of data about existing beers in the marketplace (which would be really preferable), I’m using this as an example set of what the typical range of beers would be if every single beer style were represented evenly in the market. In this case, one of each.

In this post, I’m looking at the average Original Gravity (OG) and Final Gravity (FG) for each style and here’s why:

OG is a measure of how much sugar is present in wort pre-fermentation and FG is a measure of how much sugar is present in wort post-fermentation. Using the two together, you can calculate the amount of alcohol in a beer, which is always a useful statistic. In theory, with these, we can get an accurate sense of how sweet or dry a beer will be. This is, of course, exactly what we need to play against IBUs to attempt to predict what a beer will taste like. Sweeter beers should balance against high IBU beers to create more balance. Dry beers should accentuate hops to give an impression of a more bitter beer.

For the purposes of this I translated OG and FG to “Gravity Units” (GU) by starting with the OG, subtracting 1 and multiplying by 1000. Or, in other words, I just took the last 2 digits of the OG:

1.054 – 1 = .054 * 1000 = 54

Playing with all these numbers has been a little funny. I keep on playing with almost arbitrary math to try to play with these numbers in a way that makes sense to me, and here’s been my stumbling block:

For years, I’ve been using the system laid out in Designing Great Beer by Ray Daniels. It’s somewhat of a biblical text in my house. Sometimes I just read it for fun. In this book, Ray uses a ratio of BU:GU to figure out balance in beer. It’s a good system, but the more I’ve been looking at it while playing with these numbers, the more I think it might be a little – not a lot, but a little – off base.

I sorted my style list by GU – just to get a quick gander of what it looked like. In theory, if the BU:GU ratio is correct, then the beers with the highest GU should be the sweetest and the beers with the lowest should be the driest. And while it’s close, it doesn’t quite work out.

It’s close, but to have things like Lambic, Scottish Export 90/-, and Kolsch all right next to each other doesn’t seem quite right. Same goes for having Southern English Brown, and Scottish Heavy 70/- down on the “dry” end.

If you were sorting in order of alcoholic strength, this would be pretty close.

Just to make sure I wasn’t misrepresenting the stat by taking BU out of it, I also sorted by BU:GU ratio. It’s *also* really close, but you still get things like Strong Scotch Ale (BU:GU of 0.26) and Standard American Lager (BU:GU of 0.256) being directly next to each other. Certainly, the ratio of hops to malt in them are very similar, but the flavor profile of these beers is staggeringly different. On the other end of the scale, I can come up with Ordinary Bitter (BU:GU of .834) and AIPA (BU:GU of .84) right next to each other. Again – ratio similar, flavor profile vastly different.

I keep on doing weird crap to these numbers to try to get something closer. I calculated apparent attenuation (how much sugar has fermented out of the solution) to see if that made sense and that was all over the map. I really wanted to apply attenuation back to the original gravity to see if I could get the high gravity beers with low attenuation to just fall out naturally, but since attenuation is based off of OG and FG I kept coming back to the final gravity. And then I thought something that sounded in my head like, “Duh.”

So I sorted by Final Gravity to see what the list looked like. Here it is from lowest FG to highest FG:

If you were looking for a list of beers, dry-to-sweet, this is pretty damn close. Of course, it makes a lot of sense. The lower the FG is the less sugar is in it. What’s more, because of the limitations of what yeast can actually digest, the higher OG beers will pretty much never ferment out as low as the lower OG beers, with the possible exception of that wacky Saison yeast, so high FG beers will always be sweet, and low FG beers will always be dry, OG be damned.

My next step was, logically, a BU:FU ratio and, again, it’s super close. In order of low-to-high ratio, this would be – in theory – malty-to-hoppy. Clearly, I’m not accounting for pH here, so any sour beers are going to land in the malty end.

Nice list! The only real problem is that, in terms of creating a statistic, our numbers start at .702703 (Strong Scotch Ale) and end at 6 (IIPA). It’s a really weird metric – it’s good for making this list, but not for saying something like, “This beer is a 35? Woooo! Hoppy!” Which is, essentially, my end goal here.

So next up? Making these numbers into a form that’s easier to digest than .702703. With any luck, this should be pretty quick.
In the meantime, homebrewers (or hey.. commercial brewers if you guys are reading this with baited breath), can you do me a favor?

Go do a BU:FU calculation on some of the beers you have logged into your brewing journal. Get the end number, (like .702703), multiply by 20 (it’s an adjustment), then tell me the style of beer, the number you came up with, and if YOU think the beer was malty, hoppy, or balanced.

It goes like this:

Let’s say you made a Vienna Lager, FG of 1.012, 24 IBUs.

24/12 = 2
2 * 20 = 40

“Erik, I made a Vienna Lager, the number is 40, I thought it was quite well balanced.”

Part 1 of this little series happened a while back. It was my original foray into trying to figure out a good simplified set of statistics for beer. Feel free to head back there if you need a refresher.

You may have thought that I forgot all about this. In reality, I have been percolating.

The problem with my original post is that a lot of the math I’m using is fairly arbitrary. Basically, I was experimenting to try to find something meaningful. Mind you, that covers a good portion of actual statistics, but what I keep going back to in my head is that what I really want to do is come up with a good way to represent the relationships between the existing numbers in an easy to read statistic for the layperson.

So today, I’m heading back to IBUs because this, I think, is the root of a portion of the problem.

IBUs are calculated in a sensible manner… ish. The original calculation (for metric units) is meant to predict how many mg of iso-alpha acids there are per liter of beer. For example, 30 IBU = 30mg of iso-alpha acids/liter.

Uaa is the percentage of alpha acid that is actually used during the boiling process

Vw means the volume of the wort, in gallons

1.34 is a constant factor that adjusts the measurement to account for the use of U.S. customary units

There’s a little bit of a woogy bit on Wikipedia. They note in their text:

The bittering effect is less noticeable in beers with a high quantity of malt, so a higher IBU is needed in heavier beers to balance the flavor. For example, an Imperial Stout may have an IBU of 50, but will taste less bitter than an English Bitter with an IBU of 30, because the latter beer uses much less malt than the former.

True!

Then they note:

The technical limit for IBU’s is around 100; some have tried to surpass this number, but there is no real gauge after 100 IBUs when it comes to taste threshold.

This is where referencing Wikipedia comes around and bites you in the ass. On the other hand, it’s like someone is asking me to write this post.

The problem here is that other elements in beer do (of course) effect bitterness. 100 IBUs might be very hoppy but, as they note, the more malt there is the less the bitterness is perceivable. By that logic, if something is very highly malted you should technically be able to detect a bitterness difference above 100 IBUs. Certainly, there is a significant difference between Dogfish Head’s 90 Minute IPA (90 IBUs) and Dogfish Head’s 120 Minute IPA (120 IBUs). I’m having a hard time believing that the difference would be the same if it were only 10 IBUs more instead of 30. Maybe I’m deluding myself.

In any case, a measure of hop bitterness within a beer is not an accurate measure of the actual bitterness of the beer. However, the formula stated above does accurately measure the bitterness being contributed to the beer from the hops. We have to assume that there are other factors, but we’ll get to those another day. For now, let’s keep talking IBUs.

The BJCP guidelines (which are just a tick more static than other guidelines right now) show us that in the full range of beers in the world, acceptable IBU values range from 0 (at the low-end of Gueuze) to 120 (at the high end of American Barleywine and Imperial IPA). For the sake of argument, let’s consider those as our range. We have to accept the theory that there can be beers above 120 IBUs, because they can exist mathematically, but let’s call 120 our arbitrary upper limit because in order to standardize things, we need one.

Just for giggles, here’s a quick plot of all of the upper and lower limits of the BJCP beer styles, sorted by the mean IBU of each style (in green).

Far left is Gueuze, far right is IIPA. You can click it for a bigger version.

What you can really get off of this is that the vast difference between the middle and the top vs. the middle and the bottom.

I broke all of the styles into three values: Bottom IBU, Top IBU, Average IBU. They are the stated bottom of the acceptable range for the style, the top of the acceptable range for the style, and the average of the range.

The mean of the Bottom IBUs is 21. The mode is 20.

The mean of the Top IBUs is 37. The mode is 40.

The mean of the Average IBUs is 29. The mode is 30.

So what does this tell us? That the line between “hoppy” and “not hoppy” is much thinner than it might seem when the upper end is 120. As we’ve already noted, this has a lot to do with factors other than hops, and that IBUs aren’t the best way to measure the bitterness of the beer itself, just how many hops were put in.

Okay, cool. That first part is interesting and the latter part is fairly obvious. We know we need to use IBUs – at least in part – in order to calculate an overall bitterness, so let’s see if we can breakdown the range of IBUs a little better. From this point out, I’ve actually discarded the average for anything but sorting, and I’ve put the highs and the lows together in the same variable to give us the upper and lower limit of the acceptable range all in one place.

The mean of all of the IBU values across all of the beer styles is 29, the median is 25, and the mode is 20. The standard deviation of values from the mean is ~19.

This seats the middle of the range of IBUs in beer styles squarely in the 20’s, and I would say that the average (29) probably represents what we could call our middle in terms of perceived hoppiness. The standard deviation from the mean gives us a high end of 48 – let’s say 50 – and a low end of 10. Anything above 50 would definitely be hoppy (but not necessarily bitter) and anything below 10 would probably not have any hop character at all.

If we were to break it down on this scale we could say that we have, essentially 4 categories.

If we made the “low hop” cut off 29 (the average) instead of 30, Ordinary Bitter, American Brown Ale, Sweet Stout, Belgian Trippel, Baltic Porter, Eisbock would all be in the “high hop” category.

If we made the “very hoppy” cut off 48, English IPA and Foreign Extra Stout would be in the last category.

It’s close. Really close. Of course, some of the beers that end up in the hoppier categories actually end up having a much lower perceived bitterness due to the fact that they’re also very malty. Sweet Stout, Trippel, Baltic Porter, Eisbock, English Barleywine and Old Ale come to mind.

So now we have some benchmarks in place. I had been treating IBUs as a continuous scale, because it is a continuous measurement. However, if you believe that 100 IBUs is the upper limit of human detection and 0 IBUs is the lower limit, that would suggest a mid-range of around 50 IBUs. We’ve shown here that the mid-range, at least in terms of what we expect out of our beer styles, is actually a little lower than that, so we may actually have to do a little bit of normalization when we’re using IBUs in a formula to calculate bitterness more efficiently.

Next up: An IBU standardization formula and how OG and attenuation fit into the bitterness equation. (Part 3 is here)

The theory, in my mind, is that nobody wants to pick up a beer and think, “1.056 and 1.010 with 60 IBUs.. hrm… that’s pretty bitter.” Some beer geeks can do that in their heads, but a lot of people can’t, or don’t want to. On the other hand, if you could pick a beer and say, “A hoppiness rating of 92? Good heavens! That’s big!” it would be pretty cool.

So, I’ve been playing with numbers a wee bit. Mostly collecting them. I started with the BJCP Style Guidelines. I recorded the maximum and minimum stats for OG, FG, and IBUs and calculated what the average beer would look like in each style category.

This is just to give a basic sample range of beers to work with that should be fairly representative of all the styles involved, though I’ve considered removing sour styles from this exercise, since Lactic Acid kind of fouls everything up on the whole, “This is what flavor you should expect” front.

I also calculated apparent attenuation for each style – finding out how much sugar has been fermented out from each on average.

(GU – FU)/GU

The Average English IPA listed above has an Apparent Attenuation of 77.60%. In other words, 77.6% of the sugar in the solution has been converted to alcohol. In reality, that’s not quite right, since alcohol is lighter than water and this is being calculated by the density of the liquid. You can ferment down to a final gravity lower than 1.000. However, for this purpose, this calculation should be good enough.

Then, I made what I’m (currently) referring to as a “hoppiness score.” It’s on the same line as a GU:BU ratio, but instead what I did is divide IBU by GU, then multiply it by 100 to give us a nice round number that we can related to instead of a decimal. The theory is that the more hops there are in comparison to original gravity, the higher this number would be. It should correspond with how hoppy the beer is. It works fairly well.

The English IPA up there would have a hoppiness score of 80. Is it an arbitrary number? Sure. Work in progress. Bear with me.

Then I applied apparent attenuation. It was noted in the discussion that the more dry a beer is, the more bitterness would be apparent to the drinker. I agree. To account for this, I multiplied the hoppiness score by the apparent attenuation. I called this “Apparent Bitterness.” I figured that the drier a beer was, the higher the apparent attenuation would be and so the closer the “Apparent Bitterness” would be to the Hoppiness Score. In the full list of styles, it does what I was hoping for and tends to give styles in which you would expect more bitterness a higher score.

Here’s the list I was working from sorted by Hoppiness Score:

Style #

Style Name

Hoppiness

Apparent Bitterness

14C

Imperial IPA

113

91

13E

American Stout

88

65

13A

Dry Stout

87

69

07C

Dusseldorf Alt

85

64

14B

American IPA

84

66

08A

Ordinary Bitter

83

63

19C

American Barleywine

81

63

14A

English IPA

80

62

02B

Bohemian Pilsner

80

56

13D

Foreign Extra Stout

76

60

02A

German Pilsner

74

58

08C

Extra Special Bitter

74

56

08B

Special Bitter

74

57

13F

Russian Imperial Stout

74

55

07B

California Common

74

56

10A

American Pale Ale

71

54

12B

Robust Porter

66

50

07A

North German Alt

65

49

02C

Classic American Pilsner

63

47

10B

American Amber Ale

62

47

19A

Old Ale

60

45

13B

Sweet Stout

58

38

12A

Brown Porter

58

44

13C

Oatmeal Stout

58

43

10C

American Brown Ale

57

43

04C

Schwarzbier

55

40

11C

Northern English Brown

54

42

06C

Kolsch

53

43

19B

English Barleywine

53

40

11A

Mild

51

36

01E

Dortmunder Export

51

39

16B

Belgian Pale Ale

49

37

03A

Vienna Lager

49

37

16C

Saison

49

43

09C

Scottish Export 90/-

48

35

06D

American Wheat

47

37

06B

Blond Ale

47

36

09B

Scottish Heavy 70/-

47

31

09A

Scottish Light 60/-

46

30

03B

Oktoberfest

45

33

04B

Munich Dunkel

44

33

09D

Irish Red

43

33

11B

Southern English Brown

43

28

05A

Maibock/Helles Bock

43

34

12C

Baltic Porter

40

29

01D

Munich Helles

40

31

17C

Flanders Brown

39

33

01C

Premium American Lager

39

32

18C

Belgian Trippel

38

32

06A

Cream Ale

36

29

05B

Traditional Bock

35

26

18D

Belgian Golden Strong Ale

35

30

17B

Flanders Red

33

29

16D

Biere de Garde

33

27

18A

Belgian Blond Ale

33

27

16A

Witbier

31

25

05D

Eisbock

30

22

18E

Belgian Dark Strong Ale

30

24

01A

Lite Lager

29

27

15D

Roggenbier

29

22

15C

Weizenbock

29

22

18B

Belgian Dubbel

29

24

04A

Dark American Lager

28

22

15B

Dunkelweizen

28

21

09E

Strong Scotch Ale

26

16

01B

Standard American Lager

26

22

15A

Weissbier

24

18

05C

Doppelbock

23

18

17A

Berliner Weisse

18

16

17D

Lambic

11

9

17E

Guezue

10

9

And the same chart sorted by Apparent Bitterness:

Style #

Style Name

Hoppiness

Apparent Bitterness

14C

Imperial IPA

113

91

13A

Dry Stout

87

69

14B

American IPA

84

66

13E

American Stout

88

65

07C

Dusseldorf Alt

85

64

19C

American Barleywine

81

63

08A

Ordinary Bitter

83

63

14A

English IPA

80

62

13D

Foreign Extra Stout

76

60

02A

German Pilsner

74

58

08B

Special Bitter

74

57

08C

Extra Special Bitter

74

56

02B

Bohemian Pilsner

80

56

07B

California Common

74

56

13F

Russian Imperial Stout

74

55

10A

American Pale Ale

71

54

12B

Robust Porter

66

50

07A

North German Alt

65

49

02C

Classic American Pilsner

63

47

10B

American Amber Ale

62

47

19A

Old Ale

60

45

12A

Brown Porter

58

44

13C

Oatmeal Stout

58

43

06C

Kolsch

53

43

10C

American Brown Ale

57

43

16C

Saison

49

43

11C

Northern English Brown

54

42

04C

Schwarzbier

55

40

19B

English Barleywine

53

40

01E

Dortmunder Export

51

39

13B

Sweet Stout

58

38

16B

Belgian Pale Ale

49

37

03A

Vienna Lager

49

37

06D

American Wheat

47

37

06B

Blond Ale

47

36

11A

Mild

51

36

09C

Scottish Export 90/-

48

35

05A

Maibock/Helles Bock

43

34

09D

Irish Red

43

33

04B

Munich Dunkel

44

33

03B

Oktoberfest

45

33

17C

Flanders Brown

39

33

18C

Belgian Trippel

38

32

01C

Premium American Lager

39

32

01D

Munich Helles

40

31

09B

Scottish Heavy 70/-

47

31

18D

Belgian Golden Strong Ale

35

30

09A

Scottish Light 60/-

46

30

06A

Cream Ale

36

29

12C

Baltic Porter

40

29

17B

Flanders Red

33

29

11B

Southern English Brown

43

28

16D

Biere de Garde

33

27

01A

Lite Lager

29

27

18A

Belgian Blond Ale

33

27

05B

Traditional Bock

35

26

16A

Witbier

31

25

18E

Belgian Dark Strong Ale

30

24

18B

Belgian Dubbel

29

24

15D

Roggenbier

29

22

04A

Dark American Lager

28

22

15C

Weizenbock

29

22

05D

Eisbock

30

22

01B

Standard American Lager

26

22

15B

Dunkelweizen

28

21

15A

Weissbier

24

18

05C

Doppelbock

23

18

09E

Strong Scotch Ale

26

16

17A

Berliner Weisse

18

16

17E

Guezue

10

9

17D

Lambic

11

9

It’s not quite right, but it’s definitely headed in the right direction. I would love to hear from anybody who has different ideas on how to represent these numbers, and you can damn well bet that I’ll be posting more as I fiddle around with math.

One of the most bizarre parts of starting a brewery is planning that’s far away from buildings, business plans, or venture capital, and it’s probably one of the most important decisions that you can possibly make: What kind of beer do you make first?

It’s vital. It’s the beer that first defines your brand to customers; it’s the beer that will most likely, but not necessarily, be with you for the entirety of your existence.

So, how do you decide? Do you want a session beer that people can drink a lot of? Something big and memorable that people won’t drink a lot of? Do you want to make an incredibly popular style and subject yourself to a ton of competition? Or make a hard-to-get style and hope that people will go out of their way to try it? What’s more – is there a way to balance all of these considerations?

When I was shopping at Whole Foods this weekend, I took a stroll through the beer section and noticed that 75% or more of the beers that they had in there were IPAs or APAs.

In one panel at the Craft Brewers Conference this year, I remember a slide (wish I had a reference for you, but I don’t) noting specifically that most customers expected and wanted to see a stout on tap at their brewpub, but that it was continually the lowest-selling beer on tap.

A study by the BA in 2002 (which I can no longer find, so you’ll have to trust my AWESOME memory) suggested that craft beer drinkers who said they had a favorite beer drank that beer, on average, once per month. So on some level, all of this is subject to whim, no matter what.

It all seems like crazy conflicting information? So how do you deal with it?

For me, it’s been a weird process of elimination. I started by looking at the beers that I like. It is my personal feeling that a flagship should be with a brewery as long as possible, as a strong part of their brand definition. With that in mind, it had better damn well be a beer that I enjoy since I’m going to be the one around it most.

I cut it down to beers for which I had already made recipes that I enjoyed, so that I could then work on perfecting those recipes over the next few years as I work on the nuts and bolts of the rest of the startup … you better believe I have a beer in my hand every time I work on my business plan.

That left me with a half dozen beers to choose from. I eliminated the really high gravity stuff with the thought that I would prefer if people bought a lot of my first product, and the best way to get people to buy a consumable product is to make sure they consume it.

That left me with three. One of which I eliminated because it involved an herb that I thought would be a tough sell out of the gate.

That leaves me with an IPA and a Porter.

Tough sell.

Of course, I’m still early on in the process – it all may change in time, especially as I develop new recipes that I – and others – like.

But what about others?

Beer drinkers: What are you most likely to try from a new brewery?

Breweries: How did you arrive at your final decision for your flagship?